After a thrilling opening ceremony, the first day of the Special Olympics World Games kicked off with a lot of fanfare, with various divisioning events spread out throughout the city of Berlin. The Indian contingent participated in divisioning events across 14 out of 16 sports.
The biggest performances of the day came from Swimming, where 11 out of 12 Indian athletes qualified for the semi-finals in their respective categories of 25m freestyle, 25m breaststroke, and 50m breaststroke. Also, 4 Indians qualified for the Semi-Finals in Athletics.
The Indian Men's Football team and Women's Football team also competed in the group stages of 7-a-side matches. While the Men's team earned a draw against Saint Lucia, the Women's team managed to eke out a win over SO Israel.
Earlier in the day, Special Olympics announced the formation of the Global Leadership Coalition for Inclusion, a pioneering multilateral effort to support people with intellectual disabilities. For the first time, governments, industry, philanthropy and the development community came together with a shared global commitment to increase inclusive practices in education and sport and create more inclusive schools and communities.
Over the next three years, Coalition members have committed to expanding inclusive sports and education opportunities to over 2,000,000 young people in more than 150,000 schools and scaling Special Olympics programming to 180 nations. The discussions between Special Olympics Bharat and the Ministry of Education in India are already underway to introduce the Inclusive format of Sports in schools and colleges.
The second day of action will see several more divisioning events take place through the course of the day, with medal rounds expected to begin on Tuesday.